In the framework of the International Metabody Forum IMF 2017 with a new phase of development of Metatopia 4.0 will be elaborated, exploring new flexinamics building techniques, habitable spaces, robotics, VR, AI, new technical and artistic developments, new metaformance formats of audience involvement, therapeutic applications, co-creation environments with neurodiverse people, refugees, prisoners, indigenous people and other communities, itinerating in rural areas as well as cities. Like in preceding years newsite-specific and body-specific versions will be elaborated in each city and country, expanding the processes from previous years into deeper, more sustained collaborations and processes.

METATOPIA proposes a reflection on the role of embodiment in the Big Data era where increasing prediction and modulation of behaviours occurs by reducing the complexity of gesture to calculable elements, inducing expressive homogenisation while affording unprecedented control. Metatopia environments propose to reintroduce the full spectrum of embodied expression highlighting indeterminacy and empowering people to recuperate public space and the body as resistance to the ways in which current media tend to invade or erase these transforming them into hipercontrol spaces.

METATOPIA is based on the novel Flexinamics techniques developed by Reverso in the European project METABODY, based on flexible and dynamic structures, a concept of wearable architecture that blurs the boundaries of body and environment, with flexibility of all components and the constant physical dynamism and mutation of the modules. It consists both of bare physical structures connected to bodies, and of embedded systems of micromotors, sensors and other embedded systems as well as of associated movement techniques: architecture conceived as emergent and indeterminate movement relations.

METATOPIA is a swarm of intra-active, intelligent, nomadic architectures in urban spaces or indoors, an Occupy 2.0 or “refugee camp” for the new digital world order: embodied spaces of indeterminacy as resistance in Big Data and Hypercontrol society, a new distributed life-form.

FORMATS AND MODALITIES

METATOPIA proposes a novel format called metaformance, hybrid of installation and performance, focusing on the perceptual experience of the participant, in a move away from established spectacular formats, while challenging traditional accounts of robotics, VR and AI. Metatopia proposes the notion of Metagaming, a concept of interactive multisensory platforms across the physical and digital for outdoors and indoors involving full body interaction, non-goal oriented activity, non-quantifiable and non-competitive play, favoring diversity of gestural interactions, embodied and non-verbal communication and away from the aesthetics of simulation and control. Metatopia evolves in always newsite-specific and body-specific versions to be elaborated in each city and country.

METATOPIA can be presented in a wide variety of spatial compositions and scales, from large urban interventions to small intimate performances.

4. Group performance indoors/outdoors:

5. Participatory Installation-peformance indoors/outdoors:

where the audience enters the modules and activates the physical space as well as the digital architectures and electronic sound. This format can include performative aspects or moments or hybrids of installation-performance.

6. Metasculpture:

Installation including robotics with embedded micromotors and sensors for the autonomous movement of the structures which become an autonomous living organism infiltrating buildings in varied compositions.

In an apparent future that could be the present a planetary cyberorganism, or hipercyborg, called Big Data Brother, traces, cuantifies and modulates every movement of every human and non-human body and space. There is a diffuse guerilla of Metabody agents that aim at deprogramming the hipercyborg through mobilizing unquantifiable movements, untraceable behaviors, emergent perceptions and illegible affects, towards increasing diversity of bodies and behaviours, infusing indeterminacy into the system. Metatopia is the architectural, kinetic and perceptual laboratory of the Metabody agents, XXI century Quixotes that undo the invisible strata of power disseminating diffuse actions across all spaces, a metapolitics for a potential Occupy 2.0 movement in the era of global surveillance.